The Narrowest Path: Antinomic of Form in Adorno's Aesthetic Theory Analyzed through Kleist, Hegel, and Marx

Philosophical aesthetics;post-Kantian philosophy;political philosophy;Marxism;modernism studies;Theodor W. Adorno;Heinrich von Kleist;G. W. F Hegel;Karl Marx;Comparative Literature

Mehrgan, OmidTobias, Rochelle ;

Johns Hopkins University

关键词: Philosophical aesthetics;    post-Kantian philosophy;    political philosophy;    Marxism;    modernism studies;    Theodor W. Adorno;    Heinrich von Kleist;    G. W. F Hegel;    Karl Marx;    Comparative Literature;   

Others  :  https://jscholarship.library.jhu.edu/bitstream/handle/1774.2/60093/MEHRGAN-DISSERTATION-2018.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: JOHNS HOPKINS DSpace Repository

【 摘 要 】

This dissertation takes Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory as a point of departure to analyze a number of antinomies basic to modern German thought and bourgeois society. The principal aim of this dissertation is to interpret Aesthetic Theory’s diagnosis of the nature of aesthetic form under the historical conditions of modern bourgeois society since the late eighteenth century as a basis for examining the fate of autonomous form as such under capitalism.The dissertation opens by exploring Adorno’s late thesis that art in bourgeois society must have a double character as ;;both autonomous and a fait social” if it is to fulfill its condition as something made that appears like nature. I analyze the inevitable conflict between two equally valid aspects of the work of art: the formal law and its genesis in capitalist production. In order to lay bare this antinomy, I employ aesthetic and historical categories from Idealist, Marxist, and neo-Kantian traditions that make up the immediate context for Adorno’s aesthetic theory. After revisiting Adorno’s proposed resolution to the antinomy, in chapter two I read Heinrich von Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas (1810) in terms of the novella’s effort to reconcile its two conflicted tendencies: forensically pursuing its theme, a lawsuit, and moving towards its own lawfulness as a literary work. A reconciliation is necessary so that the novella can separate itself both from the suggestions of the prevalent juridical discourse and from dominant literary habits. While it fails to reconcile them, I argue that by showing the conflict in its formal structure it becomes a successful literary work.Chapter three examines Hegel’s systematic and historical constitution of the person in his Elements of the Philosophy of Rights (1821) and detects a conflict between the self-governing ;;I’ and its emergence out of the modern relations of hired labor. As the first major modern philosopher to turn to the new discipline of political economy, Hegel was at pains to reconcile the predominantly economic life of bourgeois society with the autonomy of modern individuals owing their status as persons to their relationship with hired labor. These relationships, by design, make it impossible for all individuals to become persons, however. I discuss the difficulties in Hegel’s resolution to this conflict through his theory of the state.Chapter four shows how, in Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), the revolutionary act of proclaiming the republic as a political form claiming to represent all people comes into conflict with that act as it is conditioned by the rise of capital and the attendant rule of one class over all others. Written at a turning point in modern European history when the idealist projects of autonomy in philosophy, aesthetics, and politics had reached their limits, Marx’s short book reveals, according to my interpretation, the philosophical import and the political implications of the conflict between an autonomous form, the French republic, and its real conditions of possibility in capitalist society.I conclude the dissertation by discussing the political nature of the aesthetic modality in which the modern problem of autonomous form was posed and trace the path to Adorno back through Marx, Kleist, and Hegel.